40s and 50s Memories
Remaining in farming all my life, by 1980 I
was Chairman of the Hants. County National
Farming Union (NFU) and in 1983 a London
Delegate for the NFU.
J. A. COLE
Woodard 1949
John Cole left King's in 1949 as House Captain
of Woodard and School Captain.
He writes:
After having gained some work experience at
Standard Telephones & Cables in Ilminster,
Somerset and in Footscray, Kent, I went up
to Clare College, Cambridge to read Natural
Sciences in 1950. BP funded my MSc in
Geophysics, an investigation on how solutes
disperse in groundwater flow. I completed
this in 1955, and joined Services Electronics
Research Laboratory in Baldock, for two years.
During this time I worked on titanium and
zirconium hydrides.
Then I spent two years in Nigeria with the
Geological Survey, doing field-work in the
attractive savannah belt of Northern Region,
looking for prospective areas for water wells
and boreholes. We used electrical resistivity
measurements, which help to locate the
prospective weathered zones. I also made
a magnetometer traverse across the Benue
valley and a gravity survey near Lake Chad,
technologies which help to define buried rift
valleys and sediment infill.
Back in Britain by 1959, for the next ten
years I worked in the Physics Division in the
Water Research Association (WRA) on water
mains leak detection and in-pipe obstructions.
During this time I was appointed Head of
Hydrology Division at a new WRA laboratory at
Medmenham, Bucks., with a team working on
river flow, aquifer modelling, reservoir yields,
pollution measurement and risk. The last
mentioned culminated in a book which I edited
entitled 'Groundwater Pollution in Europe.'
I contributed papers at many conferences
convened by the International Association of
Hydrological Sciences (IAHS), and acted as reviewer/ editor for several of these events.
Sabbatical leave (1969-70) allowed me to take
up a Visiting Lectureship at the University of
North Carolina. Here I could work on reservoir
systems and their control rules, a subject taught
there at PhD level. At the end of that academic
year I spent a month at U.S. Geological Survey
in Washington DC, to acquaint their engineers
with my reservoir systems research work.
Over the next 24 years I was back in the UK,
working at the Water Research Association.
This organization became the commercial
entity WRC plc in the 1980s. During this time
I reached a grade as a hydrological specialist
which allowed me to call on teams from across
different disciplines, thus widening the spread of
technologies I could bring to bear in the projects
on which I was engaged, particularly in the field
of pollution measurement and control.
From 1995 until 2002 I was retained by the
WRC plc as Hydrological Consultant for water
pollution jobs, and this gave me opportunities
for publication in several hydrological and water
engineering journals.
In addition to the professional dimension of my
working life, I would like to balance this with the
personal. It was in 1956 that my wife Ann and
I married, we having met each other during the
Cairngorm Weather Surveys in 1953. We have
four children, Nancy, Andrew, Rachel and Peter
born between 1957 and 1964. Andrew was
born during our spell in Nigeria.
In 1969 we all went to Chapel Hill, North
Carolina where the children experienced the
delights of American Junior and High schools.
All the young Coles have graduated at UK
universities and now work in professions from
medicine, banking and commercial marketing.
They have children of their own, six in all, of
whom the eldest has just qualified as a doctor.
As a family we often went camping, youth
hostelling and skiing abroad, inspired by my
father's passion for winter sports in Austria and
Switzerland, together with my own connections
and friendships with French and Austrian
families.
At home, in Henley on Thames, my mother's
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